Archive for category: Identity

There’s a nice article in the Guardian by James Campbell about V.S. Naipaul, the famous Trinidadian Author of Indian descent. Currently living in the English village of Wiltshire, Naipaul has, over time, grown to accept and like his role as an outsider. “I have always seen myself as an outsider in the country,” Naipaul says, “and it’s caused me no pain at all.” It interesting to read of his reaction when entering a shop in India, and his frustration for not being noticed. An Area of Darkness–the first in a trilogy about India, spawned from this initial trip, stresses this dissociation, this innate disgust of his surrounding when visiting, perhaps of seeing himself in every man? He calls himself, “a floating man” in the article, referring to his settling in England and his stance as a person of Indian decent in Trinidad.

Naipaul’s style of writing has always melded the autobiographical with the narrative, and he’s quick to say narrative prose is undergoing a change, the form of the novel is becoming staid and should evolve –anyone can do it and he’s right, it seems there’s constant churning out of novels–but where will the form take us, more Delillo for example, more ideas in the skeletal frame of a novel and less rendering of style?

This sentence taken from Enigma of Arrival seems to justly sum up Naipaul’s distinct merging of backgrounds and the result of these upbringings:

“To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament. Those nerves had been given me as a child in Trinidad partly by our family circumstances: the half-ruined or broken-down houses we lived in, our many moves, our general uncertainty. Possibly, too, this mode of feeling went deeper, and was an ancestral inheritance, something that came with the history that had made me: not only India, with its ideas of a world outside men’s control, but also the colonial plantations or estates of Trinidad, to which my impoverished Indian ancestors had been transported in the last century – estates of which this Wiltshire estate, where I now lived, had been the apotheosis.

He speaks of this final passage, arriving at the manor but not the manor one hoped for, in this video interview (resembling a 60’s studio set!) from the Nobel website.

I’ve been reading Speak, Memory , Nabokov’s memoir of his childhood in Russia and glimpses of his later years abroad. All biographies in a sense should be like his; a mishmash of the mundane (endless descriptions of a succession of tutors), minute details of daily activities (his tireless endeavor of butterflies in the fields) and then plunk–a paragraph or two of stunning reflections, almost left as a cliffhanger for the reader. It’s like listening to an eccentric uncle you respect and admire who led an exotic life but he might go on a trifle too long about his whimsies or adventures. Just when you begin to nod off, he states something poignant, beautiful and you forgive him instantly.

After the stretch about butterflies: “I confess I don’t believe in time, I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness–in a landscape selected at random–is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern–to the genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

In one interesting passage, he relates early on in his life, how astounding his early sense of color was and how he associates letters with colors, “R” is a sooty rag being ripped, “U” is brassy with an olive sheen. Surely this correlates with his lifelong love of Lepidopterology. Nabokov’s son Dmitri writes about his father’s synesthesia on his blog! The name “Nabokov” and “blog”- clearly a misnomer! Much like the autistic savant Daniel Tammett , who also has synesthesia–in his case, visualizing numbers with colors which helps him along in his photographic memory. Tammett had an epileptic seizure at an early age possibly which triggered his autism, he is also a mathematical genius and has an amazingly aptitude for languages–learning Icelandic fluently in a week. Incidentally, Nabokov who was sick much of his youth–Scarlett fever–also went through a spell of having a high aptitude for math and also experienced hallucinations as a child. His mother had synesthesia as well, associating musical notes with colors. Nabokov had no ear for music, it skipped a generation and went to his son (who was an opera singer at one point), he says, amusingly enough in the book, “Music , I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.” The sentence itself is shocking to some degree as I’ve never really heard anyone who is repelled altogether by all music, indifferent maybe, yes. Nabokov, in itself is hard to pronounce (though the speaker sounds like he’s annunciating the “v” hard merging it into “ffs” like the French apparently do) and I can’t seem to give up my horrible American pronunciation–Nabokov himself could only describe it’s varities of pronunciation so aptly, although the corrected version tends to sound like a tedious square dance one is forced to engage in.

He left Russia at twenty and remained abroad for the rest of his life, never returning home. With exile comes a constant nostalgia one is forever carrying–a burden or a crutch but a relevant crutch as it’s supplied much muse, also a prominent theme often found in books these days exploring the immigrant experience . “The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life,”

Speaking of exile, Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk speak of being in exile and writing about the cities they left behind on the New Yorker’s video series . As the old adage goes: One must distance himself from his subject to write well about it–Nobokav’s does this best and without his extensive exile we would lose much of the haunting passages he’s written.

Is it my imagination or do bonobos seem to be very popular these days? They’re the chimpanzee’s first cousin–a branch of apes that evolved from the gorilla about 7 million years ago, the other two branches being humans and chimps. Native to the north of the congo, these apes have only really been “discovered” and studied only in the last 100 years.

Their popularity has to do with their good nature, non aggressive behavior and their active sexual life. Watching a documentary of bonobos is a little disconcerting, it’s like watching a “Mr Peepers” skit from SNL, where Chris Kattan jumps frantically from table to chair, spitting out fruit and humping everything in site (though this may exaggerated in a zoo environment, seemingly from boredom, a few have speculated).

Bonobo

Chimp

It’s interesting to compare bonobos to chimpanzees, the bonobos have smaller skulls and less of a brow, although their bodies are slightly smaller, they’re more elongated than chimps and they stand upright fairly often. The bonobo’s eyes seem more expressive and intelligent. and they’re also far less aggressive then chimps and ruled by a matriarchal society. A recent story in the New Yorker has an interesting article about them. Along with a nice photo spread by James Mollison.

In the article there’s a funny anecdote about a man named Yearkes who compares two species he had in captivity, a chimp, called Panzee and Chim, a bonobo. – the chimp Panzee was timid, dumb, and foul-tempered. “Her resentment and anger were readily aroused and she was quick to give them expression with hands and teeth,” Yerkes wrote. Chim (the bononbo) was a joy: equable and eager for new experiences. “Seldom daunted, he treated the mysteries of life as philosophically as any man.” Moreover, he was a “genius.

Some insane experiments were done in the 20s, where human sperm was injected into chimpanzees’ uteruses, needless to say it didn’t work but the result would be a “Humanzee , Chuman, or Manpanzee”, the latter sounds too much like marzipan, I tend to favor “Chuman” it sounds like a Victorian disease. Chumans might evolve like this if we’re lucky.